Eighth Day Books is an eclectic book store popular among Christian book lovers in Wichita, Kansas.CreditCraig Hacker for The New York Times

By Mark Oppenheimer

May 15, 2015

WICHITA, Kan. — Eighth Day Books lives in an old three-story house on Douglas Avenue, just east of C&R Comics and Superior Rubber Stamp. It is not exactly a Christian bookstore — while sitting at the communal table, I can pull off the shelf works like Greil Marcus’s “The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs” or scoot my chair a couple of feet and grab, Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken.”

Still, the store’s name, Eighth Day, serves as a secret handshake among Christian book lovers, and its following reaches far beyond the heartland city it serves. Popular Christian writers like Lauren F. Winner and Rod Dreher are fans and erstwhile visitors. On one wall hangs a picture of Kallistos Ware, an Eastern Orthodox bishop and theologian, taken during his visit in 2002.

Warren Farha, 59, gray-haired and laconic, is the store’s founder, custodian, clerk and sole book buyer, a job that is more complex than it would be at a typical independent bookstore. The store’s shelves are divided into sections like Monastic Writings & Studies, Patristic Writings & Studies” and C. S. Lewis & Friends, and filled only with books Mr. Farha would read. So no cooking or travel.

Yes, Hillenbrand is on the shelves. But it is Mr. Farha’s more eccentric tastes that mark his store.

“We order a lot of university press stuff, and Christian presses, of course, but since we try to carry a deep selection of Catholic and Orthodox literature, sometimes we’re ordering from monasteries,” Mr. Farha, said. “Monasteries that publish books. Quite a few of our books are English translations, but published by some monasteries in Greece — books by abbots living in monasteries on Mount Athos.”

Mr. Farha grew up in Wichita. So did his father. His grandfather moved here from Lebanon in the 1890s.

“Wichita was only 20 years old at the time,” Mr. Farha said, “and it was wide-open territory for businessmen and merchants.” Fleeing persecution and conscription, his grandfather immigrated here and drove a wagon, “selling dry goods and notional stuff to farmers.” Mr. Farha’s father took the family business into groceries, from there into building supplies.

The family attended St. George Orthodox Christian Church when Mr. Farha was young, less so as he got older. When he was about 16, he heard a sermon by a young evangelist from California, and he was briefly drawn to the evangelical Jesus Movement. But at Wichita State, where he received a degree in religion and classical studies, he returned to the faith of his fathers.

In college, Mr. Farha and four or five close friends would talk for hours about theology and ideas. They were all book lovers. “We’d talk playfully,” he said, “about what books the perfect bookstore would have.”

Several of the gang became professors, but Mr. Farha joined the family business, hawking floor covering and other building materials. Did he enjoy the work? “I enjoyed working with my family,” he said.

In 1987, Mr. Farha’s wife was in an automobile crash. She lingered in a coma for two months, then died, leaving him to raise their two children. Six months later, his father died.

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Warren Farha, owner of Eight Day Books, named the store after a term early Christians like Augustine used to refer metaphorically to the new order, timelessness or eternity.CreditCraig Hacker for The New York Times

“That was quite a year,” Mr. Farha said.

The next year, everything began anew. He married Chris, whom he had known since they were children at St. George. Then he opened his bookstore, which he named Eighth Day after a term early Christians, like Augustine, used to refer metaphorically to the new order, timelessness or eternity.

“All I knew was the kind of books I wanted to be in it,” Mr. Farha said. “And I knew retail, because I had waited on people since I was 10 years old. But I started from scratch.”

With one full-time employee and three part-time, Mr. Farha still vacuums the rugs and cleans the bathroom (on the shelves of which one can find piles of overstocked books by the poet and essayist Albert Goldbarth, who teaches in town). About a dozen times a year, Mr. Farha loads up his blue van with books — “60 Ingram boxes,” or about 3,000 books, “is maximum load” — and drives alone to conferences, from South Hadley, Mass., to Santa Fe, N.M.

“You get into a groove,” he said of the driving. “Listen to music, loud.”

Eighth Day has maintained profitability, or something like it. “A lot of break-even years,” Mr. Farha said. “Part of the problem for me is that I don’t care about technology at all. I was the last to know about email, online selling, the Internet, Amazon. Of course, now I have to care about it.”

Mr. Farha regrets the demise of his paper catalog, which was mailed to 25,000 recipients a year until it ceased publication “about 2012 or 2013.” They were his kind of people.

“Our catalog customers were devout,” Mr. Farha said. “There were days we got 50 orders a day from the catalog alone. We’d get mail orders. People would tear out the form and mail it in.”

The store stocks about 25,000 titles, and about 30 percent of the inventory is used, or “recycled,” as the yellow stickers on the books say. He has never taken a full week of vacation. “I guess the closest I came was when my son got married in California,” he said. “That was almost a week.”

The basement is given over to a well-curated children’s section. His favorite books include “Gilead,” by Marilynne Robinson; “Jayber Crow,” by Wendell Berry, and the three-volume saga “Kristin Lavransdatter,” by Sigrid Undset, a Norwegian who won the 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature.

“It’s like putting together my best constellation of books,” Mr. Farha said of his inventory. “I worry from time to time if the bookstore is just a collection of my tastes. I hope it’s bigger than that.”

Mr. Farha, who with his second wife had a third child, has no plans to retire. When he does, none of his three children will take over. They have no interest. “It’s O.K.,” he said. “They’re all beautiful kids, and I wouldn’t change a thing about them.”

I wondered if he considered the store a form of evangelism. “Is it a Christian mission?” I asked.

He thought for a while. Eventually, he decided.

“It’s not a mission,” he said. “I just think by definition, if you have books that articulate truth, that it’s going to be a de facto Christian mission, because I don’t think you can separate different truths from each other. They’re all connected.”

mark.e.oppenheimer@gmail
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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Wichita Bookstore Expresses Its Founder’s Eclectic and Christian Tastes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe